Caught up in the tariff spat between the United States and Canada is a little-known treaty that shapes the lives of millions of Americans and Canadians.
The 60-year-old treaty governs the water rushing down the Columbia River, which snakes from British Columbia through Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and provides the single largest source of hydropower in the United States. But parts of the treaty expired around the U.S. presidential election.
Negotiators were still weeks away from completing the details of an updated version of the treaty when President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s term ended. Then a decade of talks crashed into President Trump’s hostility toward Canada. He called Canada the “51st state,” slapped tariffs on Canadian exports and fixated on tapping its water as a “very big faucet.”
In a contentious call in February with Canada’s prime minister at the time, Justin Trudeau, Mr. Trump included the treaty among the ways he said Canada had taken advantage of the United States. The implication was clear: The treaty could become a bargaining chip in a broader negotiation to remake the relationship between the two counties.
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mr. Trump turned down the heat during their meeting at the White House last week. But the Trump administration has made even treaties with benefits for both sides feel like a negotiation on the edge of a knife. Mr. Trump’s erratic trade policies have thrown uncertainty into the future of the Pacific Northwest, creating new worries around everything from electricity to flood control.
Data centers that power the internet and artificial intelligence run off the Columbia River’s power. Twilight soccer games duke it out at riverfront parks funded by local dams. Irrigation from its reservoirs supplies water to rolling acres of Pink Lady and Gala apple orchards. Coordinated dams hold back floods in Portland, Ore., and elsewhere.
Mr. Trump touched a raw nerve among Canadians, who have long worried that the United States sees their resources — water in particular — as its to plunder. “They want our land, they want our resources, they want our water, they want our country,” was a mantra Mr. Carney repeated during his successful run for prime minister.
“The Canadians feel such a sense of betrayal,” Jay Inslee, until recently the governor of Washington, said in an interview. The treaty ties together an intricate web of cultural and economic interests. “It is not easy to negotiate that,” Mr. Inslee said, “and it makes it much harder when the guy across the table thinks you are a snake in the grass.”
A spokesman for British Columbia said there had not been “any movement at all” since the U.S. State Department paused the negotiations as part of a broad review of the country’s international commitments. While that’s typical after a change in administration, “that sounds like a strange euphemism for what’s going on,” Adrian Dix, the province’s energy minister, told almost 600 people in a virtual town hall in March.
Mr. Dix said local residents had pulled him aside at the Save-On-Foods market to ask if Canada should pull out of the treaty altogether. “For the people of the Columbia Basin, this is visceral,” he said. “This is part of their lives and histories and souls.”
If the pact were to blow up, the United States expects it would become “more difficult to control and predict” hydropower production, and increase uncertainty for preventing floods in the Pacific Northwest, according to a nonpartisan congressional report. The region’s electricity needs could double in the next two decades, according to new estimates from an interstate power council.
The State Department declined to comment.
The treaty’s roots date to Memorial Day in 1948. After a heavy spring rain, a 15-foot wall of water wiped out Vanport, Ore., a city just outside Portland that had housed thousands of shipyard workers during World War II. The devastation left 18,000 people homeless and kicked off negotiations with Canada on how to better manage the Columbia River.
On one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s final days in office, he signed the Columbia River Treaty, which traded between two priorities: Canada agreed to build several dams that would bear the brunt of flood control for the United States, and America agreed to give Canada half of the additional electricity produced on the river by jointly managing the flow across American dams.
The original pact went into effect in the fall of 1964, with some provisions expiring after 60 years.
The discussions to update the treaty before parts expired in 2024 started during the first Trump administration. Mr. Biden paused them briefly, then resumed. In March 2023, the entire congressional delegation from the Pacific Northwest urged getting a deal done. After the slow start, the United States and Canada announced the rough outlines of agreement last summer that reflected a reality far different from what the treaty writers in the 1960s anticipated.
The power generated under the original treaty ended up being much more valuable than originally expected, with Canada’s half totaling roughly $300 million a year. That was far more than it needed, so Canada sold a lot of power back to the United States, much to the chagrin of U.S. utilities.
The updated plan cut Canada’s take by roughly half over time. That allows the United States to keep more power just as energy demand is growing for the first time in decades.
The river’s cheap, clean hydropower has been a major draw for tech companies looking to build data centers over the past two decades, even more so as artificial intelligence increases their hunger for power.
“The country, as a whole, needs to understand how important the Pacific Northwest is in that emerging picture,” said David Kennedy, who studies the history of the region at Stanford.
In return, Canada under the updated treaty reduced how much water it had to guarantee to store for flood control, giving it flexibility to prioritize the communities and ecosystems around the reservoirs. The original treaty created drastic fluctuations in the height of the water, exposing miles of dirt when the water was drawn down to prepare for snowmelt.
“Each year, this dry bottom creates terrible dust problems,” one resident near Valemount, British Columbia, told Mr. Dix at the town hall.
The new plan created more stable heights for the reservoirs so Canada can restore the ecosystems along the shores, and create better recreation.
The negotiations involved Indigenous tribes, which had no say in the initial treaty even as their fishing grounds and towns were decimated by dams.
Jay Johnson, a Canadian negotiator from the Syilx Okanagan Nation, said in the virtual town hall that the tribes on both sides of the border found common ground in restoring salmon migration. The updated plan created provisions for extra water in dry years, which he called “essential for the survivability of salmon, particularly in the context of climate change.”
In the fall, when some provisions of the original treaty expired, the countries signed a three-year interim agreement, though parts still require additional congressional appropriations. Either side must give a decade’s notice before leaving the treaty.
“It provides benefits on both sides of the border, and absent that treaty, you’ve got a lot of problems,” Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s minister of energy and natural resources, said in an interview.
No one is quite sure what will happen next. Some of the people who worked on the deal were still in place, but Mr. Trump has not yet appointed an assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs. The situation is all the more precarious because of Mr. Trump’s attempt to reduce the work force at key federal agencies involved in the treaty talks, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the federal power authority.
With the negotiations up in the air, people close to the talks in the region are hopeful the updated treaty can still be resolved.
Barbara Cosens, a law professor at the University of Idaho, said that while the Trump administration might not care about salmon habitats or the involvement of Indigenous groups, Canada did. Water may flow downstream, but salmon swim upstream, so keeping environmental provisions in play can give the United States leverage, Ms. Cosens said.
And supporters point to years of bipartisan support from Senators Maria Cantwell of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Senate commerce committee, and Jim Risch of Idaho, the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
“There is zero daylight between the Republicans and Democrats on this one,” said Scott Simms, chief executive of the Public Power Council, which represents the consumer-owned utilities in the region.
The stakes are not hypothetical. In 1996, after heavy snow, a so-called pineapple express storm dumped warm rain in the Portland area, unleashing a torrent of water. The Army Corps of Engineers worked for days, manipulating more than 60 dams in the Columbia River system with its partners in Canada to hold water at bay.
A smaller river that flows into the Columbia still flooded, killing eight people. With makeshift levees built from plywood and sandbags, Portland’s downtown was just barely spared.
Ivan Penn contributed reporting from Houston, and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Toronto.
